Sociologist Becomes Inaugural Chair in Transgender Studies

A Groundbreaking Post

What is believed to be the only endowed chair in the world exclusively for transgender studies has been created, with support from a Chicago philanthropist, at the University of Victoria, in Canada.

Aaron Devor, a professor of sociology at the university who has studied transgender issues for the past 30 years, was named the inaugural chair last month.

In the Transgender Archives at Victoria, Mr. Devor has amassed what scholars in the field describe as the world’s largest collection of materials on the history of transgender activists and research issues, with items from 17 countries. Mr. Devor, who is transgender, is academic director of those archives, which he founded in 2012. He is also the author of two books, on gender blending and female-to-male transsexuals, published by Indiana University Press.

As holder of the chair, Mr. Devor says, he plans to collaborate with other researchers to generate “solid foundational information” to assist policy makers and raise awareness of gender-identification and -expression issues.

He is participating in an international LGBTQ oral-history collaboration based at the University of Toronto, and he has contributed archival materials to a traveling art exhibit that also draws on materials from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.

“The field of transgender studies is growing at a very rapid pace,” he says. One in 200 people in North America and Western Europe are transgender, he estimates, and they are at greater risk of suicide, poverty, and unemployment than the general population is.

The new chair was created with $1 million (U.S.) from the Tawani Foundation, which has pledged up to $1 million more to match other potential contributions.

Tawani’s founder and president is U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jennifer N. Pritzker, retired, a transgender woman who is heir to a family fortune. In a statement emailed to The Chronicle, she explained that she decided to finance the chair in the hope of bringing “enlightenment, knowledge, and tools for society to better understand and deal with issues of human sexuality.” She said she hopes the post will lead to “a global network of institutions interested in this field of study.” — Karen Birchard and Jennifer Lewington

In the Name of Innocence

After the New York Supreme Court vacated the convictions of Korey Wise and four other men in what is known as the “Central Park jogger” case, Mr. Wise found himself looking for ways to help others who might have been in a similar situation.

His lawyer had a suggestion: Donate some of the money he received in a settlement with the City of New York to the University of Colorado at Boulder so it could hire a full-time director for its Innocence Project, a student volunteer program that investigates claims of wrongful conviction.

With Mr. Wise’s pledge of $190,000, the university has hired Kristy Martinez to run the program, now renamed the Korey Wise Innocence Project, at Colorado Law. Ms. Martinez practiced law for 10 years through the state’s Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel, helping defend the indigent in criminal cases. “I worked at both the appellate and the post-conviction level, learning a lot about how to review a case post-conviction,” she says. That experience helps her teach students what can go wrong at each stage of the process.

Mr. Wise spent more than a decade in prison after being found guilty, despite scant evidence, of having helped rape and seriously injure a woman who had gone running through Central Park in 1989.

His connection to the University of Colorado came through his lawyer, Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, who herself was in the process of moving to Colorado. Ms. Fisher-Byrialsen knew of a clinical professor at Colorado Law, Ann England, who was trying to raise money for the Innocence Project.

“I think the thing that intrigued Korey was that he felt this project could benefit in a pretty tangible way,” says Ms. Martinez. After Mr. Wise came to speak with the students in the fall, “we were all inspired by him, and I don’t let that leave the office,” she says. “The day I don’t carry his message, I’ll stop doing the job.”

As director, she is designing a more formal curriculum, with clearer training materials and objectives; working to organize the nonstudent volunteers who want to help; and trying to build a greater presence in the community. Thirty-five students are working with her now, investigating 32 cases. — Angela Chen

A Culture of Service

Education is important in “unlocking all the doors,” Thomas A. Isekenegbe tells first-generation learners at the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College, where he became president in August.

He quickly embraced a plan to improve the college’s graduation rates.

In his previous job, as leader of Cumberland County College, in New Jersey, for six years, Mr. Isekenegbe worked closely with local businesses and the county on work-force development, and redesigned remedial courses so students could move through them more quickly.

He had planned to finish his career at Cumberland. But he was drawn to the challenges at Bronx. Ninety-three percent of that institution’s 11,400 students are black or Hispanic, and the student population represents dozens of countries of origin.

The college will be the first among the City University of New York’s institutions to enroll all full-time freshmen in the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, which provides students with extra academic and financial support. The goal is to graduate at least 50 percent of those who enroll this fall in three years.

The university system began pilot ASAP programs in 2007. The three-year graduation rate for students who enrolled in the program from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2012 is 54 percent, compared with 18 percent for students with comparable backgrounds who were not enrolled in ASAP.

Mr. Isekenegbe says he can identify with the challenges of his students, especially those born outside the United States. He grew up poor in Nigeria, then earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nigeria and a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from Indiana State University. He began working in college administration in 1988.

One of his goals for the college is to create a culture of service, working in partnership with local nonprofit organizations and offering service-learning courses for all. His wish, he says, is based on a childhood philosophy about “what the power of one and the strength of many can do for a community.” — Kate Stoltzfus

New Chief for Stanford

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist and president of Rockefeller University, has been named the 11th president of Stanford University. He will assume his new post on September 1.

Steven A. Denning, chairman of Stanford’s Board of Trustees, praised Mr. Tessier-Lavigne in a written statement for his breadth of understanding of the university’s mission, his “infectious energy,” and his experiences in leading efforts “to develop knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

Mr. Tessier-Lavigne, a native of Ontario, Canada, was a professor of biological sciences at Stanford from 2001 to 2005. Before he took the helm at Rockefeller, a biomedical-research institution in New York, in 2011, he was executive vice president for research and chief scientific officer at the biotechnology company Genentech Inc.

He will succeed John L. Hennessy, who expects to step down at the end of August, after nearly 16 years in the top role. — Andy Thomason

Obituary: Expert in Organ Matching

Paul Ichiro Terasaki, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of California at Los Angeles who developed a test that is widely used for organ transplants, died on January 25. He was 86.

Mr. Terasaki, who was born in Los Angeles, spent three years in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona with his family during World War II. He earned a bachelor’s degree at UCLA, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in zoology there. For a year, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University College London under Peter Medawar, the transplant pioneer who later won a Nobel Prize.

In 1964, Mr. Terasaki developed the microcytotoxicity test, which became the internationally accepted method for genetically matching organ donors and recipients.

After working at UCLA as a researcher, he became a professor there in 1969 and served on the faculty until his retirement in 1999. Mr. Terasaki published more than 900 scientific articles.

He established and directed the Tissue Typing Laboratory at the university and started the first kidney-transplant registry there.

With eight of his former students he founded a company, One Lambda, to advance tissue typing.

Over the years he donated more than $58 million to the university. UCLA’s Terasaki Life Sciences Building is named for him, and its Paul I. and Hisako Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies is named for him and his wife. — Anais Strickland

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